Your patients are asking AI, not Google. Are you in the answer?
The front door to your practice moved. Most healthcare brands haven’t noticed.
Here’s a small thing that’s quietly becoming a big thing.
A patient used to open Google, type “dermatologist near me,” and scroll a page of blue links until something looked right. Now a growing number of them open ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity and just… ask. “Who’s the best place near me for a laser treatment on melasma?” And the AI doesn’t hand back ten links. It hands back three names, with reasons.
Read that again, because it changes the game. The old goal was to rank. The new goal is to be recommended. Those are not the same thing, and being great at the first one doesn’t get you the second.
If you’re not one of the three names the AI offers, you’re not on page four anymore — you’re nowhere. There’s no scrolling. There’s no “see more results.” The patient reads the short list, picks one, and books. The entire consideration set just got compressed into a sentence, and either you’re in it or you aren’t.
The uncomfortable part: most healthcare marketers have no idea whether they’re in it. They’re still watching Google rankings and calling that visibility. Meanwhile the actual decision is happening in a conversation they can’t see, driven by sources they’ve never audited, about a question they’ve never thought to ask the machine themselves.
We think this is the single most important shift in healthcare marketing right now — and it’s early enough that getting ahead of it is still a real advantage. The brands that figure out how they show up in AI answers, and whether they show up at all, get to be the default recommendation while their competitors are still optimizing for a results page nobody reads.
You don’t need to panic about it. You do need to stop assuming Google rankings and AI recommendations are the same thing. They’re diverging, fast.
The first move is almost embarrassingly simple: go ask. Open ChatGPT and Gemini, type the questions your patients actually ask, and see who comes back. If it isn’t you, that’s not a small SEO tweak. It’s the new front door — and right now, someone else is standing in it.
Curious whether you show up when it counts? It’s a conversation we’re having with a lot of healthcare brands right now.
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